Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Monday, May 27th, 2019

The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper

Author:     Dan Cohen
Source:     The Atlantic
Publication Date:     26 May 2019 | 0600
 Link: The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper
Stephan:   I am increasingly concerned by what might be called The Ignorance Trend. Indeed, I started writing novels -- have you read one of my novels? -- because I realized that there is a notable decline in reading non-fiction work; this article lays it out at the university level; and, I thought, I could put much the same material in novels as I do in my scientific writing. But at the fundamental level what I am seeing is growing ignorance in any area not immediately linked to a person's money-making tasks. What do I mean? Super programmers I have met could not tell me how many justices there are on the Supreme Court, and their sense of American history is a mix of nonsense and propaganda they have encountered on the web.

Reuters/Juan Carlos

When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.

Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.

Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, […]

Read the Full Article